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FACILITATING THE SPREAD OF KNOWLEDGE AND INNOVATION IN PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Cloud Migration eMag Issue 33 - October 2015 ARTICLE INTERVIEW ARTICLE The Cloud-Migration Anatomy of a Cloud Transitioning to Cloud- Checklist Migration Program: Native Applications Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 1 The Cloud-Migration Checklist Are you in the process of moving applications to a public cloud? You’re not alone. 451 Research says that 46% of 2015 IT budgets are going towards off-premises systems, with that number expected to climb to over 50% within the next three years. In this article, we’ll explore four stages in a cloud migration lifecycle and the questions to answer before exiting each one. Anatomy of a Cloud Migration Program: Q&A with Tim Beerman Many cloud providers offer services to onboard new customers into the cloud. What advice can they give us on how to prepare for a migration, what pitfalls to avoid, and what types of apps are the best fit for the cloud? To learn more, InfoQ reached out to Tim Beerman, the VP of Product Strategy and Development at CenturyLink. Transitioning to Cloud-Native Applications and Beyond Enterprises have continued to accelerate their adoption of cloud infrastructures. As this shift continues, it is important to understand what this means to applications that run in cloud environments. Why You Should Definitely Migrate Existing Apps to the Cloud In this article we’ll explore various benefits of migrating your existing apps to the cloud in detail so that you can make an informed decision. FOLLOW US CONTACT US GENERAL FEEDBACK [email protected] ADVERTISING [email protected] EDITORIAL [email protected] facebook.com @InfoQ google.com linkedin.com /InfoQ /+InfoQ company/infoq London Mar 7-11, 2016 Conference for Professional Software Developers www.qconlondon.com Tracks for QCon London 2016 • Architectures You’ve Always Wondered • DevOps & CI/CD - Lessons/stories on optimiz- about - Case studies from: Google, Linkedin, ing the deployment pipeline Alibaba, Twitter, and more... • Security, Incident Response & Fraud Detec- • Disrupting Finance - Technology advances tion - Master-level classes on building security in fi nance (blockchain, P2P, Machine Learning, into your system and responding to incidents API’s) when things go wrong. • Data Streaming @ Scale with Spark - Big • Head-to-Tail Functional Languages - Free- data, fast-moving data. Practical implemena- range Monads, Tackling immutablity, tales tion lessons on Real-time Data with Spark from production, and more... • Close to the Metal - Get effi ciency back into • Data Science & Machine Learning Meth- your code, concepts like: cache effi cient algo- ods - A developer’s data science and machine rithm and lock free data structures learning toolkit • Modern Native Languages - Modern native • Optimizing You - Keeping life in balance is al- languages: Safe effi ciency with Go, Rust, Swift ways a challenge. Learning lifehacks • Containers (in production) - Real-world les- • Microservices for Mega-Architectures - sons on scalability and reliability in produc- Practical lessons on Microservices success. tion container deployments • Architecting for Failure - Your system will fail. • Modern CS in the real world - Real-world In- Take control before it takes you with it dustry adoption of modern CS ideas • Modern Agile Development - Revisiting Ag- • Full Stack Javascript - Level up Javascript ile today and tackling challenges we are see- with topics like Angular, React/ReactNative, ing in the wild Node, Mongo/Couch/Other, Falcor, GraphQL, • 21st Century Culture - New ways to organise etc technology companies and workplace culture RICHARD is the VP of Product for CenturyLink, a Microsoft SEROTER MVP for Integration, Pluralsight trainer, lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, frequent public speaker, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter. A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Countless surveys show that companies are considerations for planning out workload migra- steadily moving applications from on-premis- tions. es to cloud environments. While it’s easy to get This eMag has four major topics: excited about deploying brand new apps to the 1 A cloud migration checklist that takes you cloud, the reality is that most companies have through the multiple phases of a migration on-premises data centers full of existing applica- project, with key considerations for each tions that could benefit from a cloud migration. phase. These migrations often seem straightfor- 2 Guidance on transitioning to a cloud-native ward -- just pick up the virtual machines and mindset and deploying apps that can take move them into a cloud! Inevitably, complexities the most benefit of a cloud environment. surface and cast doubt on the entire endeavor. 3 A look at the types of applications that make There’s so much more to a cloud migration than sense for the cloud. a basic lift-and-shift exercise. 4 An interview with a team that regularly mi- How do you assess your application portfo- grates complex customers to cloud environ- lio and identify the candidates for cloud? What ments. apps should you avoid migrating? How can you As you read this eMag, you may see slight decide on the right cloud environment for a giv- variations for your own use case, but hopefully en app? Is it better to move apps incrementally much of the guidance resonates and provides or via a “big bang” exercise? What pitfalls should actionable data to help you be more successful you look out for? InfoQ decided to investigate in your transition. this topic further and share our findings. In this eMag, you’ll find practical advice from leading practitioners in cloud. Discover new ideas and 4 Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 Read online on InfoQ The Cloud-Migration Checklist by Richard Seroter Are you in the process of moving applications to a public cloud? You’re not alone. In its fourth-quarter 2014 “Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud Computing”, 451 Research said that 46% of 2015 IT budgets would go towards off-premises systems, with that number expected to climb to over 50% within three years. Organizations still purchase starts all over, potentially with and not all of them fit your cloud services in order to save different technologies and ob- specific needs. One cloud money, but increasingly iden- jectives. While the below check- may offer thousands of tify strategic goals like “time to list may help you start your jour- virtual servers in seconds, market”, “improved availability”, ney, it’s important to personalize which is wonderful if you and “establishing new revenue it to your particular situation! are among the organizations streams” as primary drivers of that need such a capability. Assessment adoption. A recent survey that Another could deliver white- showed that only 27% of partic- There is no “one size fits all” cloud glove managed services that ipants were extremely satisfied service. Many organizations try may or may not be relevant with their cloud-migration ex- to identify a preferred cloud en- to your mode of operation. perience indicates that there’s vironment before understanding Consider what matters most clearly room to discuss how to how that cloud matches their to your organization, and introduce cloud services into organization’s maturity, culture, actively try out a handful your IT portfolio and successful- and application portfolio. What of providers that fit the bill. ly transition apps or data to the questions should you ask of Don’t just blindly choose a new environment. yourself and the candidate pro- leader in a particular cloud To be sure, any migration viders? domain and accidentally is never truly “done”. As you con- • Are you the right fit for this choose a provider that ham- stantly hire new services to solve cloud? There are countless pers your ability to deliver business problems, the cycle providers of cloud services, services successfully. Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 5 • What are your capacity de- in business for more than a may introduce unforeseen mands? Based on the type month, you probably have latency. If your applications of workloads you’re consid- an existing set of tools and have integration points with ering for the cloud, different processes that you’ve grown on-premises systems that do providers may bubble to the accustomed to using. If you not migrate to the cloud, you top. Is your application port- can’t easily adapt your tools may also see performance folio bursting with modern, to the candidate cloud envi- problems due to long-dis- cloud-native applications ronments, make sure you’re tance connections. Cloud that capitalize on thousands comfortable replacing the servers come in all shapes of cheap, ephemeral servers status quo with the toolset and sizes, so make sure that or containers? Do you need supported by the cloud ven- you give your applications a relatively slow-growing dor. the necessary CPU, memo- pool of a few hundred du- ry, and disk horsepower to Planning rable compute resources? meet or exceed their historic Consider your application Congratulations, you’ve picked performance levels. landscape and make sure a cloud provider for a particular • What are the hybrid-inte- that providers can support business domain. Now comes gration plans? It’s unrealistic your upper bounds of com- the hard part: planning a migra- to think that you’ll move an pute, storage, and network tion! What are the most import- entire application portfolio throughput. ant things to consider when plot- to the cloud at once, or may- • What are the actual ting out the migration strategy? be ever. Treat the cloud as a costs? The cost of cloud is • What are the candidate logical extension to your ex- rarely the easily calculated apps/workloads/environ- isting landscape and consid- number you see in the price ments? Ideally, the first ap- er how you will extend your list. Make sure to model re- plications you move to the current data, network, and al-life scenarios and look for cloud aren’t the trickiest, identity to the cloud. special charges the provider most business-critical ones. • Have you identified the first may apply based on geog- But either way, make sure adopters? A migration to the raphy, backup storage, con- that you do a comprehensive cloud can be disruptive, and sumed bandwidth, API calls, inventory of applications it’s important to find people and more. Also, don’t forget and indicate those that are within the organization who to factor in costs for on- the best fit — strategically or are eager to help define new boarding programs, support tactically — for a cloud envi- standards and guide the or- plans, and net new environ- ronment. ganization through this im- ments (e.g. performance • What’s the topology of portant transition. testing, staging) that didn’t the application architec- • How will users access the en- exist on premises. ture? There’s a good chance vironment? Your co-workers • Where are the gaps, and that your application ar- probably already have too are they still gaps after mi- chitecture will differ in the many passwords to manage. gration? It’s likely that you’ll cloud. Cloud servers, data The last thing you want to do finish your first assessment services, and networks be- is add an entirely new set of of cloud providers and have have differently than their complex credentials neces- a list of perceived or actual on-premises counterparts, sary to access a critical set of deficiencies. It’s important so you may need to evolve cloud services. Look at single to talk about those with the your reference architecture sign-on (SSO) mechanisms provider and see if there are and deployment process in offered by your cloud ven- plans to close those gaps or order to fit in this new world. dors and make this an up- viable workarounds to those • What possible performance front aspect of any project to gaps. One possible work- bottlenecks are being intro- adopt a cloud service. around is that the infrastruc- duced? Does moving to the • How will you train staff? It’s ture or application pattern cloud guarantee an instant important for your team to that caused the gap is refac- boost in application perfor- become deeply familiar with tored to fit more natively into mance? Absolutely not. If these new cloud services. the cloud’s defined model. you take a monolithic appli- Consider each audience (e.g. • What’s the fit for your ex- cation and distribute its parts project managers, develop- isting tools? If you’ve been among cloud services, you ers, architectures, system 6 Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 administrators) and tailor users can tolerate a pro- this data over your Internet materials that help staff get longed downtime while a connection. For large data comfortable in the cloud. migration occurs, you may sets, however, you might be • What internal processes pursue a simple, yet disrup- incurring significant band- have to change in order to tive cutover plan. However, if width charges from your capitalize on the new ser- you want to minimize down- cloud provider and long vice? Your documented time, you will have to con- transfer times. In those cases, procedures for hardware sider strategies where you it’s better to either compress requisition, change manage- set up the new environment the data and copy it to a ment, testing, and deploy- and keep it in sync with the staging location in the target ments may not apply in the primary environment until cloud before transferring it same way when using cloud the time comes to steer all to the final destination or to services. If you attempt to traffic to the new instance. physically ship drives to the overlay current processes on • How will financial process- cloud provider (if they sup- more agile, self-service envi- ing occur? Yes, you’ll proba- port that). ronments, you may lose all bly have to pay for your cloud • What security controls are in the benefits that you were usage. How will you do that? place during transit? During after in the first place. Do an Do you plan on charging the migration, you may end honest assessment of the each business unit that con- up using staging servers or changes that you need to sumes cloud resources or temporary object storage re- make. simply pay the entire bill out positories. Make sure you’ve • How will you deploy up- of a general fund? Make sure thought through the data dated code, data, and con- to think through the process and access security consid- figurations to the envi- of incurring charges, getting erations, especially for sensi- ronment? Your new cloud an invoice, and making a tive data. service may work with your payment. • Migrate virtual ma- existing system-administra- • Have you completed a small- chines. Moving entire VMs tion tools, or it may not. If scale pilot that flexes all the is one way to migrate an you’re using modern config- above concerns? Above all, application to the cloud. uration-management tools don’t go into a migration There can be unexpected like Chef or Ansible, you may with only paper prototypes. side effects, depending on find extensions that work Physically set up applications how the VM was attached seamlessly with your cloud in the target cloud and do to the on-premises network, destination. Make sure that trial runs. Get familiar with the domain it was part of, you do a thorough simula- the interface, capabilities, the types of drives used, tion of the deployment and and constraints so that you and more. While a “lift and configuration process and develop hands-on expertise. shift” of VMs often appears identify any areas that need to be the easiest route to Migration improvement. the cloud, it’s often more • What’s the plan for operat- With proper planning, the migra- complex than expected. ing this service after migration itself should be uneventful. Additionally, that sort of ap- tion? The migration is only To be sure, surprises will invari- proach doesn’t force you to the start of that application’s ably surface when the actual mi- reconsider your application new life in the cloud. What gration is underway but, if you’ve architecture and strategic happens when a change is answered the above questions, ways to refactor your appli- needed? How do you trou- your team should be equipped cation for the cloud. bleshoot a problem? What to handle the unexpected. • Migrate data. Your data may monitoring hooks will you • How are you distributing move to a database-as-a-ser- use to measure key perfor- the apps and data to the vice environment, or a mance indicators? Look at cloud environment? There self-managed database in- the full lifecycle of a cloud are a handful of ways to get stance. Make sure you know workload and consider all your applications and data which tools are provided by the care-and-feeding activi- up to a cloud location. For the vendor and what limita- ties. moderately sized workloads, tions exist regarding data • Do you have a strategy for you can often use simple volume or structure. cutover? If your application copy commands and pass Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 7 • Migrate applications. If your application deployment tool can natively point to cloud infrastructure, containers, or application platforms, you’re in good shape. You’re also probably in the minority! It may take some reconfiguration to get your on-premises tools to deploy code to the cloud, or you might evaluate new tools to make the process more seamless. • Recreate metadata. Companies often say that they want portability in the cloud and seek to avoid lock-in with a particular vendor. Good luck with that. While assets like virtual machines and application code can move relatively freely between clouds, environment metadata is often very provider specific. Account structures, users, permis- sions, policies, load balancers, and the like vary from cloud to cloud. Make sure you know how to set up the supporting con- figurations for your particular cloud destination. • Validation • Once the migration is completed, it’s critical to verify that all aspects of the application are performing as expected. • Is the application reachable? A simple test, but it’s vital to check out all the various application services and make sure that users can access them and that internal components can communicate without error. • Did all the data make its way into the environment? Through automation — or, at worst, a manual spot check — verify that both transaction data and reference data successfully transferred to the cloud. If you have complex data relationships, one failed migration can cause a cascading problem. • Can administrative tools access the cloud environment? You hopefully verified this during your planning phase, but here’s one last chance to validate that all of the management tools can see the cloud application and monitor it with no issue. Summary Every day, organizations are successfully adopting cloud services and breathing new life into their IT portfolio by migrating applications to a more agile environment. Unrealistic expectations are a leading source of migration frustration. The best way to avoid this angst is to seriously evaluate your organization’s goals and readiness, and answer practical questions about the planned migration process. 8 Read online on InfoQ Anatomy of a Cloud Migration Program: Q&A with Tim Beerman by Richard Seroter Tim Beerman is vice president of product strategy and development at CenturyLink, focusing on platform migration and onboarding strategy. Having joined CenturyLink in 2008, Tim has held senior leadership positions and has been responsible for world-class infrastructure products and application solutions that serve as the backbone of the company’s managed hosting initiatives. Most recently, he drove the strategy to implement CenturyLink’s managed- services suite of products in the core CenturyLink Cloud, laying the foundation for a broad range of future managed services under a single unified platform. Many cloud providers offer services to bring new customers into the cloud. What advice can they give us on how to prepare for a migration and what pitfalls to avoid? To learn more, InfoQ reached out to Tim Beerman, a VP of strategy and development at CenturyLink. customer relationship: 1) gener- I like to use the analogy What things besides migration al platform introduction and ex- that a good onboarding pro- are part of cloud “onboard- pectation/goal setting (i.e. What gram should “teach the custom- ing”? does the customer want to ac- er how to fish” so they learn how complish through onboarding?); to be self-sufficient using the Tim Beerman: “Onboarding” is a 2) account configuration and self-service capabilities avail- very broad term that can mean hands-on training to accomplish able to them. Of course, differ- a lot of different things to dif- the goals defined in step 1; and ent customers may have differ- ferent audiences. In general, a 3) a thorough closure session ent requirements based on the successful platform onboarding where the customer understands scale of their operation, so the program will accomplish three how to engage the platform sup- onboarding program should be primary goals, all culminating in port model and what tools and able to accommodate as appro- a delightful customer experience KBs are available to them for con- priate versus a “one size fits all” that extends throughout the tinued learning and updates. approach. Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015 9 they will be operating within. is best to move the app and ap- Which aspects of migration an That being said, this is where a plication tier first (the web tier is be faster than expected? Slow- strong onboarding program real- usually pretty straight forward) er? ly shines as it provides an avenue because if any problems are en- for customers to learn the ins and countered that are not a result of Obviously, there are a lot of vari- outs of their new platform with the separation, it is easier to fail ables that come into play in a some professional guidance as that tier back to the source ver- migration and it is largely de- they get started. sus re-synching the database. pendent on the complexity of How does your team val- the environment. The one aspect idate that a migration was suc- of migrations that can often be cessful? slower than expected is the up- Validation is an important What types of apps do you dis- front planning. Many people courage a company from mi- final step in the migration pro- believe that they can just pick grating? cess. In fact, throughout the entire up an image and start the mi- migration process, certain steps gration process and turn every- have their own validations such thing up on the destination plat- Applications that have a trans- as checksums on data transfers form. There are a lot of things to actional reliance on data sourc- for individual components. Usu- consider as you start the process, es (i.e. databases, mainframes, ally, once the new environment is including such things as licens- etc.) that are not proximate to built out, both environments will ing, IP addressing, performance the cloud location may not be run in parallel (one in production differences in how the exiting good candidates for migration. and the other for testing) for a application may perform in the Also, some applications that given period of time to ensure destination, etc. Careful plan- are designed for physical server the application works properly ning and consideration of these implementations versus virtu- and performs as expected before elements up front can save a lot al are not good candidates for the final cutover. Once satisfied, of time and effort on the back cloud migration as HA schemes we work with the customer on end. One thing that can often be may not work properly, perfor- a final data synchronization and faster than most people expect is mance may be impacted due cutover of the production envi- the actual build-out of the des- to such things as storage types ronment while keeping the origi- tination site. With proper use of (FC vs. iSCSI or NFS), or licensing nal in place for further validation available automation and tools, may not be compatible. This, of period. Of course, smaller or less the general configuration goes course, may not be an issue if complex environments may not quite quickly depending on the your cloud provider offers phys- need this diligence and cutover migration method employed. ical servers as part of their cloud and validation can happen very platform (shameless plug :) ). quickly. In all cases, we rely on the customer to give the thumbs up that they are happy in their new home and support them as Are you seeing that organizations start migrating on their Do you typically move an en- necessary to make that determi- own first and then get help, or tire system (e.g. web, app, da- nation. start out being guided by oth- tabase servers) to the cloud or ers? just a subset? If a subset, how do you avoid negative perfor- Many customers migrating to mance impact? How does migration to a SaaS a cloud are doing so for the or PaaS platform differ from self-service flexibility offered This largely depends on the over- moving to an IaaS environ- by cloud platforms. As a result, all size and complexity of the en- ment? many choose to migration on vironment and latency between their own, especially if good doc- source and destination. Whenev- SaaS and PaaS migrations have umentation and migration tools er possible, it is best to move the their own unique challenges, such as image import are readily entire stack — and if latency be- but the primary difference from available and easy to use on the tween locations is an issue, it be- IaaS is that all the hardware is destination platform. This gives comes a requirement. If latency abstracted so you are largely just them a great opportunity to re- is not a big issue and it becomes dealing with environment con- ally understand the platform that necessary to break it up, then it figurations and data transfer. If 10 Cloud Migration // eMag Issue 33 - Oct 2015